The ability to serve a cold beverage has led to a century long revolution in the art of creating a cocktail. As bartenders began documenting recipes ice became an essential ingredient to mixology for its ability to cool a drink. As progressions in technology have happened consumers have developed preferences for the way a beverage is consumed. Specifically as to the cocktail evolution, language has been developed when ordering a drink to give a consumer control over the dilution factor of the alcohol beverage since there are few capable alternatives to water ice. Terms like Straight/Neat mean No Ice served in the beverage. “Shaken” means a mixed drink shook with Ice in a “shaker” then served. Some other options are Stirred Ice, Crushed Ice, Blended Ice, or Chipped Ice. The problem is, other than the Neat/Straight option each waters down the drink and changes the complexity of the spirit itself thereby leaving a gap by not giving the consumer a choice of something that is both pure and cool. Spirit companies go through great lengths to acquire water rights at particular sources due to the impact varying water has on the taste of the final product. Any foreign water or ice not from the alcohol distillery site changes the entire chemical make-up of the spirit resulting in a different taste altogether than the intention compounded by the issue that every different water source the ice is created from a different taste follows.
Ice has been used since the early 1800's to preserve medicine and food. However, as Fredrick Tudor revolutionized the “ice trade” it quickly spread to businesses and wealthy individuals. Soon ice became the essential ingredient to American mixology. However, as centuries of ice revolution continued attempts to create a frozen alcoholic beverage cube failed. Later ice trends aspired to create a frozen alcoholic ice cube but were often left with a “slushy” or blended drink partially frozen or excessive waste from the un-frozen product.
One problem in the current systems has been the inability to freeze alcoholic beverages containing ethanol into a frozen beverage cube. Indeed, traditional methods to prevent liquid from freezing have included ethanol as an additive ever since “antifreeze” was first conceived in the mid 1800's. This is so because ethanol has a freezing point of −114 degrees Celsius, which is significantly lower than the 0 degrees Celsius freezing point of water. However, attempts to freeze ethanol and serve it as an alcoholic beverage have failed because of its substantially cooler freezing point than water, coupled with a typical commercial and home freezer's capacity to only reach a temperature of −18 degrees Celsius or higher. The use of liquid nitrogen as a coolant to freeze alcohol, while sufficient to freeze liquid alcohol presents safety concerns in its use. In particular, alcohol frozen with liquid nitrogen may contain infused liquid nitrogen in the beverage, that when consumed and heated result in a phase change from liquid to gas which may rapidly expands in the stomach leading to gastrointestinal maladies.